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"Bardar" was the penname of Samuel bar Hammurabi Yaqub (dates unknown), a Jewish Persian-Assyrian poet originally from the village of Shirabad, near Urmia, in northwestern Iran. He was born in the late nineteenth century and came to the United States at the age of fifteen. In New York, he published his work in Kokhva, a Yiddish or German periodical published from 1919 to 1921, and also in an English-Assyrian publication, probably the Persian-American Courier, a weekly published from 1915 to about 1921. The Syriac text shows the poet's full name, and the Arabic text on the far right translates as "b-r-d-r."

Bardar was also known as Samuel A. Jacobs, and worked in the publishing industry. Most notably, he was E. E. Cummings' favorite typesetter for many years; in a 1925 letter to Horace Livewright, Cummings said, "Mr. Jacobs, as you may or may not know, is the only living person (literally) who understands just what I require in the way of typography." Bar Dar, as Cummings addressed him in correspondence, set the type for several of Cummings' books in the 1920s.

(Thanks are due to Eden Naby of Harvard University, who provided the identification, and Robin Dougherty of the University of Texas Libraries, who provided supporting information.)

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A letter from Bardar to E. E. Cummings, July 16th, 1931, and preliminary pages from Cummings' VV (New York : H. Liveright, 1931)

In this letter to Cummings, Bardar humorously discussed the challenges of achieving the "much longed for touch of finality or perfection" in print. The letter is followed by the limitation page, title page, verso of the title page ("Typography by S. A. Jacobs), and the first page of the poem from the book referenced in Bardar's letter, VV by Cummings.